


The Ghost and the Hawk

by Rodimiss



Series: Apartment H [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-19
Updated: 2015-03-19
Packaged: 2018-03-18 16:32:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3576261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rodimiss/pseuds/Rodimiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’re the worst buddy cop movie ever, in that they’re not cops and they aren’t buddies, so it’s more like Die Hard if you squint and stand on your head, remove the hostages, cross your eyes, insert lots of Nazi terrorists… okay, Clint Barton’s life is not a movie but is kind of Star Wars-y with the guy with the metal arm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ghost and the Hawk

**Author's Note:**

> chronologically, this comes before "The Hydra-Killing Pizza and Movies Party", although they will make sense in either order.

He sees the glint of sunlight off a sniper rifle scope on the next roof over and knows that his day just got about ten times more interesting.

Although most people wouldn’t use the word “interesting” to describe perching on a roof watching the ins-and-outs of a building that might be (most likely is) housing members of a neo-Nazi organization.

Yeah, Clint Barton’s life is something else.

It’s harder, working a mission on his own, and he can’t focus completely on what’s happening in the almost-definitely-Hydra building because he’s trying to watch his own back, too. He misses Nat not just because her absence paints a target on his back and he doesn’t spend more than thirty seconds looking in any one direction.

The sniper – he almost doubts that the sniper exists but he knows what he saw even if it was only for an instant that no one else would notice – the sniper is – was? – on the building next to Clint’s, diagonal to the Hydra building. Clint got the best seat, the one right across the street. He’s been here for half a day. He can wait longer. He’s waiting for an opportunity. He doesn’t know what it is but he will when he sees it.

Something moves five feet to Clint’s left and he looks over and sees a knife clatter against the roof and he whips back around because it’s meant to distract him, take his eyes off what’s coming, and he’s fast but not fast enough to turn before there’s a gun pressed against his head.

And a second passes, and then another.

“I’m impressed,” Clint says. “Not many people can get the drop on me.” There’s silence, and that’s one thing Clint’s not used to. He deals with snarls and angry hisses of “shut up!” and people he can goad into slipping up, but silence –

“You should probably kill me,” and he’s taking a chance there, a big chance, saying that, but he’s got a knife on his calf, an inch from his fingertips and with slow tiny movements he can pull this off, he has before. “I mean, you know who I am, I’ve been with your little Hydra-fake-SHIELD thing for how long? You know what I can do.”

“I’m not Hydra,” a rough voice says. “Who are you?”

The gun moves back away from his head. Clint stands up, forced to abandon his effort of going for his knife, hands spread to show he’s no threat – _ha_ – and readies himself to reach back, grab an arrow, and use it as a stabbing weapon – except he’s only brought along trick arrows, and none of those have a point.

And anyway, as he turns he starts to see his attacker, just out of the corner of his eyes, that first glimpse already enough for his heart to sink, he decides that figuring out any way to fight is pointless, and _(what were the odds that this actually happened)_ by the time they’re facing each other he has made peace with death, because Clint Barton is better than most people at a lot of things, but if this goes south (and it already looks that way) there is _no way in hell_ that he can take on the Winter Soldier.

\-----

Someone knocked on the door and Clint had barely opened it an inch before Natasha, bag slung over her shoulder, breezed past him and flung herself into one of the table’s two chairs. “Hey Nat,” Clint said, closing the door. “How are you? Yeah, sure, you can come in. So where have you been between now and daring a Senate subcommittee to arrest you on national television two days ago?”

“What do you have to eat?” Natasha asked, throwing the fridge open.

“I thought I was the one who couldn’t hear.”

“I’m impressed, you have stuff that isn’t takeout in here.”

“God _dammit,_ Nat.”

“Give me three minutes,” she said, taking a container of chicken and the egg carton and a tub of yogurt out and stacking them on the counter. After a pause, she frowned at the eggs and put them back, apparently deciding that putting in the energy to make something was more than she was willing to do. She stared at what she had still sitting out, one hand tangled up in her hair, and then she turned around. “I’m glad you’re alive, Clint,” she said quietly. “I didn’t know if they got to you.”

That thought had not crossed his mind. He saw that she was okay but the reverse wasn’t true. He had quietly killed the Hydra agents who had been with him on his assignment and quietly came home. He wasn’t the center of a well-publicized inquiry.

“I never thought I’d be glad to see politicians interrogating you about your past,” Clint replied. Natasha smirked and turned back to her food, leaving Clint wanting to tell her that he was proud of her for putting her messy past out there for the world to see, for politicians (with just as much red on their hands (but not personally so that didn’t count, did it) who had never done as much for their country as she had) to question her loyalty. But it sounded almost condescending in his head, not that he would ever, _ever_ mean it that way, so he kept silent and let Natasha eat everything that he meant to be his dinner and breakfast.

“What the hell happened, Nat?” he finally asked.

“Nothing _happened_ ,” she said. “Hydra was there all along,” and she told him everything. Everything up through the identity of the man who died and left behind the ghost, the Winter Soldier, a hollowed-out shell of a person turned into a weapon for the highest bidder.

(“Hydra wanted to destabilize the world,” Natasha said bitterly, “and the easiest way to do that during the Cold War was to play both sides. They could do a lot of micromanagement from within SHIELD, but sometimes their next favorite option was to lend the Soviets their best weapon and let them take out the people they didn’t like.”)

When Natasha was done speaking, Clint’s stomach was turning over at the thought of how each of the kills the Winter Soldier had to his name was committed by a man who had no choice in the matter, who was maybe buried somewhere down beneath the forced obedience, screaming. He might have been lost in those horrors by the end, might have missed something, hoped to god that maybe he had gotten this all wrong, and tried to repeat back to Natasha the information she had given him.

He ended up just repeating the parts that he was stuck on. “So they brainwashed him,” and he’s starting to feel sick, hands trembling, “until he would obey any order they gave him and then they told him to kill his best friend.” His voice broke on the last word. He hoped Natasha didn’t notice it and knew that she did.

“It didn’t work,” Natasha reminded him, and of course, Steve was still alive. “He saved Steve’s life when the helicarriers went down – we think. Steve couldn’t have dragged himself out of the river and there was no one else around when he fell.”

“Where is he now?” Clint asked. Natasha shrugged.

“We don’t know. Probably behind the little Hydra outpost that went up in smoke yesterday, in Ohio. That’s where Steve’s heading.”

Clint frowned. Did they even _have_ SHIELD offices in Ohio? Did they just have them everywhere? Probably. “And you?”

“Europe, probably. See what’s out there that shouldn’t be. You?”

“Stay here and see what’s here that shouldn’t be.” Natasha raised an eyebrow. “Our two biggest buildings were here and D.C. and they always made a point about how the main building wasn’t the only one, we’ve got undercover offices around so if terrorists like, bomb us off the map, there’s still people to respond. And of course, no one knows where they all are, so it can’t be tortured out of us. There could be a tax firm that’s staffed entirely by Hydra somewhere and we don’t know, and they’re not telling.”

“I am just warning you,” Natasha said, “in advance, that even if they’re Hydra, storming a building and killing everyone or just rounding them up for the police is kind of frowned upon.”

“Oh, so our vigilantism is only okay when SHIELD’s name is attached to it.”

“I’m saying, don’t let them know it’s you and don’t get caught.”

Clint rolled his eyes. “You take me for an amateur?”

“No, just an idiot.” Natasha grinned, her eyes bright and teasing for a moment before her face darkened. “Everyone I care about is running off to do dangerous things. Just let me have this.”

Somehow, it didn’t seem right to tease her for _scary Russian assassin showing emotions? What?_ “Couldn’t talk Cap out of going after him?”

“Honestly, I barely made an attempt.” Natasha’s fingers tightened around her water glass. “He would go no matter what anyone says. He would have died for the guy when he didn’t even know who he was.”

The strangeness of that sentence, the mess of pronouns, made Clint realize that both of them were avoiding using Bucky Barnes’ name.

“Clint,” Natasha said, leaning forward a little, grimacing. “I know I said that I think he’s heading west, but here _was_ our biggest presence, besides D.C.”

“You think he’s turn around and head out here?”

Natasha nodded. “And I think you think” – she jabbed a finger at him – “that you’re some expert at bringing crazy Russian assassins in from the cold, but what I used to be is a pale imitation of what they turned him into. We’re not the same.”

“’Course not. He’s not Russian, he’s from Brooklyn.”

 _“Clint,”_ Natasha hissed through gritted teeth. Most people consigned themselves to letting Clint, acting like an idiot, deflect the conversation away from where he didn’t want it to be. Natasha was not one of those people.

“This is all _ifs_ anyway,” Clint said, but Natasha continued to give him The Look. “But _if_ … look, Nat, three days of… _that_ fucks you up beyond anything even when you’ve got your memories to fall back on. Seventy years.” He shook his head. “I can’t just not try and help.”

Natasha’s face softened. “I know,” she said quietly. “I know; believe me, I…” She combed out a knot in her hair with her fingers before she spoke again. “But we don’t know what we’re dealing with.”

“I think,” Clint replied, “that’s going to be the status quo from now on.”

Natasha left the next day, informing him that Maria Hill was likely somewhere in the area and was The Best person to get help in hunting down Hydra from. Clint had to hunt her down first, finally decided to bump into her on her lunch break from working at Stark Industries, with a grin and a “well, look who it is.”

“What do you want?” Hill asked, ever sharp, suspicious, and right as usual.

So Clint explained, and Hill agreed, and from there it was _almost_ like SHIELD operations, on a smaller scale, and usually the same agents didn’t both plan and carry out the mission. But there was no choice and Clint spent the days biting back many bitter remarks about Fury’s inability to tell any one person more than one-twenty-fourth of an important set of information, like _how many goddamn offices did we have in Manhattan anyway?_

But Fury probably wouldn’t have known the real answer anyway. How much had Hydra done that they never even recorded in their own secret databanks? How many secret-secret missions did they carry out for themselves, using SHIELD equipment? He could only guess, based on how many missions he had completed only for the debriefing to be “that never happened” and for no mission report to ever be filed.

(Natasha kept a list of those missions – no details, just a single straight tally mark in red pen.)

SHIELD wasn’t supposed to know about missions that SHIELD carried out – missing the fact that Hydra existed wasn’t that surprising, when it truly came down to it.

It was – two weeks, three weeks, more? Clint didn’t keep track – when he put the last pieces together over a pot of coffee and immediately called Hill, forgetting that it was 10 o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday and people who had gotten jobs after the collapse of SHIELD were at said jobs.

“Barton, I’m _working_.”

He couldn’t actually picture her at a desk job, one that frowned upon guns and didn’t involve a looming man with an eyepatch. It was Wrong. (What about everything that had happened in the last month, two months, yeah two months seemed accurate, wasn’t Wrong?) “Oh.”

“Do you even have a job?”

“No,” Clint said, “because my last employers turned out to be Nazis, and I don’t know how to put that on my resume.”

He was rather surprised that Hill didn’t hang up right then. “When you can’t make rent and get evicted, I am not letting you live with me.”

“That’s not gonna happen.”

“What do you have?”

“Looks like these are our guys. I’m willing to head in anytime.”

“Good. My lunch break is in two hours, we talk then.”

They decided it was better not to wait. Clint went through his weapons closet that evening, and the next day found him lying on a roof with a sniper rifle, waiting, watching, on what looked to be a probably-difficult-but-definitely-straightforward op –

–

until the Winter Soldier shows up.

It complicates things, because Clint _does_ want to help him, _does_ want Bucky Barnes to be able to be someone beyond what Hydra has unmade him into, but –

But he has a gun on Clint and that’s really not the best first meeting.

“I’m not Hydra, either,” Clint says. “You wanna take them down?” he asks, raising his eyebrows, trying to smile a little, show he’s not a threat. (It’s the way Natasha is: look like you’re not poised to kill them at any moment even though you are.)

The Winter Soldier stares, only his eyes visible above the mask. There’s no expression, no emotion. There’s nothing there at all. “Who are you?” he repeats.

“Name’s Hawkeye,” he says. “I’m here to kill Hydra.”

The Winter Soldier continues staring. It’s not a predatory stare. It’s just a dead one. “Why?”

“Because they’re terrible people who do awful things and they need to be paid back for playing us all for fools,” Clint answers. “You’ve got the same reasons, yeah?”

He nods, slowly, eyes a little wider. It’s something like confusion or curiosity. Some flicker of emotion, and that’s enough for Clint to bite the bullet and go for it. “You up for working together? Easier with someone to watch your back.”

There’s another little flicker of _something._ “You shouldn’t trust me.”

“I’ve heard that before. Trusted ‘em anyway. We all came out better for it.”

There. That gets something, a frown, a crease of the brows and narrowing of the eyes. The Winter Soldier lowers his gun, probably the first time that has ever happened. “What information do you have about this location?” His voice goes harsher as he adds, “You worked for them.”

“I worked for _SHIELD_ ,” Clint repeats, and he’s readying himself for the gun to go back up, “I thought I was protecting people. _Wanted_ to protect people. Now I’m trying to make up for not knowing about Hydra sooner.”

The Soldier’s eyes look unfocused again, like he’s followed none of Clint’s little speech about motive and redemption. Fair enough. “Got a rough estimate of the number of people in there and the floor plan,” Clint adds, but maybe he needs something more concrete, something they can _do_ something with. “Here. The sketches are in my pocket, I just…”

The Winter Soldier tenses up when Clint goes into his pocket for the maps and doesn’t relax even when the papers are in his hand. Clint takes a huge risk and takes his eyes off the Winter Soldier to kneel down and spread his information out on the ground. “Still haven’t figured out what the best way to go in is,” Clint says, and he glances up. He sincerely doubts the Winter Soldier planned any of his ops – that’s probably too much independent thinking from a weapon – but maybe there’s still something of the sergeant with a squad under his command left in there somewhere.

He crouches down and looks at the papers and Clint gives him a minute or two before he asks, more directly, “Do you have any ideas?”

The Winter Soldier glances up, startled, and his eyes go wide again. Shocked. Shocked that – that he was asked for an opinion? Acknowledged as a goddamn human being? “Throw a grenade in the front doors and go in after it,” he says flatly. “Except for the possibility of collateral. There may be some who aren’t Hydra.”

Collateral. That’s not a word Clint has ever used to mean _innocent lives_ , goddamn _human beings,_ but at least, at _least_ the Winter Soldier understands not to kill innocents (that’s certainly not something Hydra would have programmed in), but he still doesn’t see them as… as…

Does he know that _he_ is human?

“If we barge in and start shooting,” Clint says, and now he’s pretty sure he’s not going to be killed by the Winter Soldier but he’s going to die because they don’t know how to plan, “whoever starts shooting back is Hydra.”

“Too exposed.”

Clint considers that they don’t really have a great variety of options, considers his supply of arrows (explosive, net, smoke bomb, boomerang explosive), and considers –

_Wait. Smoke bomb._

“Smoke,” Clint says. “Pop smoke at the front, one of us smashes through the back, the other goes in through the front, we clear the floor and start moving up.”

The Winter Soldier considers the plan, scanning over Clint’s papers and then glancing from him to the building. And then he nods.

“You take back, I take front,” Clint says, and he turns and grabs his sniper rifle, slings it across his back next to his arrows, and takes a collapsible bow off from his belt. It’s one of his least favorites, but he’s not planning on using it very much. He isn’t Hawkeye, not this mission.

“You good with that?” he asks, and he has his back to the Winter Soldier again, attaching a rappelling cable to the edge of the roof, preparing to head down to the ground. He turns around and the Soldier is still staring at him, unresponsive. “You okay with that plan?” he repeats.

After a moment, he says, “Yes.”

“Awesome,” Clint says, and he snaps his bow open, pulling off all of his arrows – he needs to have a better way to distinguish the preset ones without seeing them, should have brought his multivariant quiver – and selecting a smoke grenade arrow from the set. The rest he slots again on his back, exchanging them for the balaclava he brought along, just to be sure his face and name wouldn’t be tied to this entire building going up in smoke.

“We’re going in three…” _Aim steady, breathe in,_ “two…” _There’s the entrance, glass doors, bad call for them,_ “one…”

He lets loose the arrow. “Time to go.” He flicks the bow shut and grabs his cable to swing down. Clint looks back at the Winter Soldier, wondering how exactly he’s going to get down, but Clint hasn’t even started on his way when the Winter Soldier _jumps off the fucking roof._

He’s vanished when Clint gets to the ground but there’s no wintery splatter on the ground that shows it didn’t work out the way he wanted it to. He supposes he’s around the back – is there a door in the back or is he going to punch through the wall? – and he slides a visor over his eyes and clicks it to thermal, just to get through the smoke.

Then he pulls his submachine gun off his back – already he misses his bow but he’s too easily identified with that – and kicks the doors open.

Or, tries too, but it’s already a little shattered from being hit with the smoke bomb arrow, and he just puts his foot through the glass instead of actually swinging the door on its hinges.

He growls a little under his breath and shoves open the other, not completely shattered door, gun at the ready.

There’s a lot of screaming – no, yelling, gunfire and barking orders at each other, not the screaming of terrified innocents caught in a senseless attack, and Clint creeps out of the smoke and grabs the first person he sees by the neck, sticks his gun to their head, and drags them back outside to get a little further away from all of the bullets.

“Is everyone in there Hydra?” Clint snaps.

The only answer he gets – which is most likely a _yes_ – is, sounding like he’s spitting venom, the standard “Cut off one head –”

“I’ll just _burn_ your fucking heads off.” Clint is so, _so_ tired of their mantra. He is Hercules and this shit is going _down._

The man brings his foot down hard on Clint’s and kicks him in the shin, and Clint throws him down and cracks the butt of his gun against his head. “Where the hell do they find you maniacs?” he grumbled. God, if SHIELD had some slogan, they’d never get anyone willing to say it, but every single Hydra goon that Clint has run into has had _some_ glorious Hydra propaganda to spout.

It’s quiet now, the gunfire stopped, and the smoke spreading out a little. Clint heads back in, gun at the ready, but it’s unnecessary – the only thing moving is the Winter Soldier, circling the room like a vulture. Clint makes sure to scuff his feet a little on the floor, make enough noise that the Soldier knows he’s coming.

“Two stairwells,” he says, pointing them out to Clint. “One el –”

With a little _ding,_ the elevator arrives and they both train their weapons on the doors as they open. There’s no one inside and Clint is going to say something – he doesn’t know what, but definitely _something –_ when the Winter Soldier pulls a small grenade from somewhere and tosses it into the elevator.

“You take those stairs,” he says, pointing to the ones to their left, and he turns and stalks across the room to the others. Clint stares after him for a moment before he remembers _that there’s a fucking grenade in the elevator_ and he turns and scrambles too fast up the stairs.

Behind him, he hears the explosion.

Ahead of him, gunfire.

Clint pops out of the stairwell onto the next floor to find that it’s already gone quiet, and across the room he meets the Winter Soldier’s eyes, nods, and heads back up.

That becomes a reoccurring theme, because Clint, being nothing but a human with damn good eyesight (and subaverage hearing), can’t match the Winter Soldier’s speed. He apparently can ascend a staircase in superhuman time and also kill Hydra goons just as quickly. He could take the building by himself.

Clint lets him do that and just keeps going up and up, because like in video games, the boss tends to be up on the higher floors and it’s better to try to get a jump on that than to lag four steps behind the Winter Soldier.

He’s pretty sure this is the right idea when the door out to the next floor is guarded – not that it’s hard to get around. Two shots they never see coming and they’re both down but there’s more bullets inbound when Clint prods the door open by an inch. He takes his time, lying on the stairs between two bodies, inching forward until he’s got a shot that clears him to edge out from the stairwell and aim around the door to take out the other three.

This is definitely the office of someone important, because unlike the other floors that Clint saw (which were one room, entirely open, with cubicles), this one has a small open L-shaped space around a glass-walled office. The blinds are still pulled down and the glass is still intact; Clint takes a small measure of pride in that fact. Even with a gun his aim is true. Bullets in the Hydra agents and nothing else.

He opens the door of the office, gun at the ready, but it isn’t necessary. There are no more mooks with guns, just an older man that Clint knows he’s seen around SHIELD before. He’s been part of a mission briefing or two. Clint has worked for him.

The betrayal isn’t even personal but it sure as hell is still bitter.

“Stanton Burke,” Clint says, because hey, isn’t it more fun when the masked man who’s shot up your entire building full of neo-Nazis knows who you are?  

Burke stares at him and raises his head in defiance. He’s an older man, probably in his fifties, white and graying hair and sunken eyes and wrinkles. Most of the older SHIELD agents got like that, looking a little bit like death has come to claim them early from the stress of the job.

(“I’d rather die in the field than end up at a desk looking like a toad when I’m forty-five,” Clint said once, and Natasha rolled her eyes and replied, “Sorry, you’re not dying on my watch.”)

(Then there was Fury, who looked like he’d just turned around and punched death in the face right up until… yeah. Up until the man who Clint’s currently working with happened.)

“There’s nothing here that hasn’t already been exposed to the world,” Burke responds calmly.

“Like fuck there isn’t. This _building_ was secret, you think I believe you that you don’t…” Clint turns in a circle, scanning the office for filing cabinets, but the only information-storing anything is the computer. The monitor looks ancient. That’s probably a deception. The actual _computer_ part is probably the newest tech. Clint stalks over to the desk and shoves Burke out of the way – his chair tips over and Clint hopes he’s broken a hip or something. He deserves worse.

“We keep the files in the basement,” Burke gasps, and okay, however he landed _did_ hurt him, and he probably thinks that there’s going to be an interrogation that only gets worse from here so he’s spilling before it gets to that. “The police will be on their way, you won’t be able to get down there in time.”

“You know when they get here you’ll be in jail for the rest of your life?” Clint says. All right, time for a file dump onto the internet. Once again, he wishes he had Natasha here – she’s the tech-savvy one. The closest Clint ever got to computer-and-or-hacking training was the one time the one guy from R&D took his request for a USB arrow seriously.

“And you will be too.”

“I’m not planning on sticking around.” Okay, where the hell is he supposed to put this? Like, what the hell file-sharing website did Natasha use to get SHIELD’s information out so quickly? Wikipedia? Can he even _do_ that?

Can he just email everything to Natasha and hope she’s somewhere with wifi and a computer to sort it out?

He catches movement out of the corner of his eyes and pulls the gun on Burke again, as he’s reaching over toward the computer to shut the whole thing down. “Don’t.”

Okay, he was right about the actual computer being ridiculous. That many files would take a year to upload on his laptop and it’s halfway done and speeding toward completion. “Okay then,” Clint says, turning his full attention back to Burke. “What have you been doing here? What were you planning for the future? How many other outposts like you are there, and _where are they?”_

Burke says nothing. He’s sitting up now, sort of, leaning against a potted tree, one of the kind that looks fake but actually isn’t. Clint, despite being a sniper and an assassin, two professions that involve _patience_ and _waiting_ as the two most important things, is already growing tired of _patience_ and _waiting_ in an interrogation context. This part has never been his job. “Okay, two ways to do this. One, you talk to me, tell me what’s in everything I just dumped on the ‘net and what isn’t, and I’ll be nice and not torture you more than whatever you broke in that two-foot fall to the ground.” Not that Clint has any moral qualms about torturing this guy. He’s just pretty sure it’s not the right move for the situation. “ _Or._ ”

He pauses for dramatic effect. “ _Or_ you can say nothing and wait until my good buddy the Winter Soldier kills all your guys and gets up here, and he’s got like seventy years of being tortured by you fuckers to get out of his system, and I won’t stop him.”

What little color is left in Burke’s face drained at the mention of the Winter Soldier, but when Clint finishes speaking he starts laughing. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with,” he says. “You don’t know, you don’t have the mechanisms, the technology to control it, you –”

“He’s a _fucking human being,”_ Clint snaps, and yeah, that’s the last of his patience, maybe he’ll just go straight to the part where he kills this guy. “Maybe if you treated him like it he wouldn’t be running around killing every single one of you.”

There’s some shouting and a door clangs open, and Clint peers through the blinds to see that two Hydra men come running in, only to drop with two gunshots. The Winter Soldier steps in behind them and Clint goes to the office door, opens it, and steps out, making sure his gun is pointed at the floor. “It looked like you had everyone under control,” Clint says, “so I skipped ahead. Found the guy in charge of this place.”

The Soldier nods curtly and Clint steps out, holding the door open for him to pass. His stride breaks momentarily, eyes flickering towards Clint, like he’s surprised at this most basic of human gestures.

 _You can’t control_ it _._

Yeah, it’s fair enough for him to be surprised, he hasn’t been human to anyone for seventy years.

The stairwell door swings open again and Clint, caught with his gun hanging slack in one hand, has to dive out of the way instead of just getting off the immediate shot. The glass door shatters behind him, and then the walls, as the Hydra agent on the other side keeps firing. The Winter Soldier drops and in the same fluid moment, too quick to be an ordinary human, swings his largest gun off his back and fires it. The room goes silent and Clint peers out to see that there’s another body on the ground.

He springs back up to his feet and goes around the other side of the desk than where the Winter Soldier is standing, to look over Burke on the other side. His slack, terrified face looks between them and then his jaw tightens.

The Winter Soldier reaches down and hauls him up by the throat, tosses him roughly toward the chair, only for him to knock it over, crashing down to the ground again. “What do you want to know?” Burke cries, as the hand comes to his neck again, drags him back onto his feet with a cry of pain. “There’s fifty years of missions in the basement, there’s personnel files two floors up, there’s –”

The Winter Soldier throws him through the glass office wall. It’s mostly empty space but there’s shards of glass everywhere and judging by the scream, he went through a few of them. “We have a list of your retired handlers!” Burke shouts, and that makes the Soldier pause, just for a moment. “In the basement. If you hurry you can get there before the police get here –”

“And let you live,” the Soldier snarls.

“I can label a map of our every location from here to –” The Winter Soldier grabs him again, and it’s only this time that Clint realizes that he doesn’t even need to use the metal arm to pick a man up by the neck. Burke is shaking now, convulsing, and Clint frowns, because that doesn’t look like fear, that looks like –

– a seizure.

– a poisoning. Clint’s seen plenty of suicide pills in his time, plenty of deaths by cyanide, and this looks like –

Burke was stalling, rattling off as many acquisitions as he could to try to make the last two minutes of his life as painless as they could be when faced with the Winter Soldier.

“Do you know what I want?” the Soldier snarls, either not noticing Burke’s plight or not caring.

“Wh – wh…”

“I want my _life back.”_

And he moves, turns, and he’s looking at the window, and Clint knows what’s going to happen a second before the Winter Soldier throws Burke out the window. There’s no screaming, the cyanide has taken its toll too much already for him to scream. Clint hopes he’s still conscious, hopes he’s cognizant for the landing, because Bucky Barnes sure as hell was.

Clint’s not sure where to go from here. It’s probably time to leave. The Winter Soldier looks back at him and freezes, tilts his head to the side. “Do you hear that?”

“No,” Clint replies automatically, although the proper response to that question should be _hear what?_ It doesn’t matter. The Winter Soldier is a supersoldier with probably superhearing and he’s… really not.

“It –”

And that is when something in the office explodes.

What little glass that wasn’t already broken on the floor blows outward, along with a dozen other kinds of shrapnel, and Clint is flung into the wall, barely able to throw his arms up over his face in time. He hits the floor, hard, and then there is another explosion, somewhere over to his left, and then another, and that – that’s a self-destruct sequence, the building was rigged to blow and Burke must’ve set it off –

Everything hurts and the world is silent but the floor underneath Clint is still vibrating with bomb after bomb going off. He needs to tell Stark that these hearing aids aren’t as indestructible as he markets them to be, or maybe just being tossed about knocked it out of his ear, and he tries to push himself up, sit up, but his arms are burning like there’s shards of glass in them – okay there’s a ninety-five percent chance that there are literally shards of glass stabbing through his skin – and he opens his eyes to some strange heat vision readouts from the settings his visor got jostled to, and okay everything is red, that is not good. He forces himself onto his feet and suddenly he can taste smoke, filtered a little through his mask, thank god, but this is _bad._ He shoves his visor up and immediately regrets it when his eyes fill with smoke – is something on fire or did all of his arrows go crazy in the explosion –

The floor beneath Clint’s feet shakes, for an instant, and then it gives way and he’s falling.

He’s not sure about what happens after that, whether he ever hits ground, what the progression of time is, just that he has some vague sensations of movement and a profound sense of embarrassment, because Hawkeye has _never, ever_ needed an extraction plan but here he is on this badly botched mission and he doesn’t even know if he gained something out of it.

(He should have asked Hill to send someone she trusted his way, if Hill even trusts anyone.)

At some point he stops breathing in smoke, and maybe both ears are out or maybe his right ear is still functioning but there’s nothing to hear and god, he just wants to go to sleep, he’s not a supersoldier, he’s a regular human whose body can’t take the beating he gives it.

There’s still _glass_ in his fucking _arms._

And maybe his face, too.

Sound is still coming in through his right ear, but it’s nothing that helps him identify where he is or what’s going on around him, and he thinks he blacks out a couple times, which doesn’t help with the continuity of events. Eventually the throbbing pain in his head is fading enough that he thinks he can sit up without throwing up and then passing out. He’s not sure if it’s safe to give indication that he’s conscious, but his arms and legs are all unbound and he’s lying on something soft, so he’s _definitely_ not been picked up by Hydra and probably not by police.

Clint opens his eyes and finds himself staring at the ceiling. His visor is gone, as is his balaclava. He raises his arms up in front of his face, one at a time, and examines them: no shards of glass sticking out of his skin, but dozens of scrapes and cuts that show he still got a really bad time of it.

He sits up, slowly, his arms and a few ribs screaming in protest, and looks around.

It might be a hotel room, or it could be someone’s apartment, but whatever it is, it’s the sort of fancy that Clint dreamed about as a little carnie orphan. The bedspread – which he’s bleeding all over – looks like something you’d see in a museum and the curtains are some thick red fabric with intricate gold designs. A safe sits over by the door to a walk-in closet and there’s a fucking _chandelier._

There’s also two dead bodies lying propped against the dresser. It sort of ruins the atmosphere.

Clint hears something to his right — which is the only direction he’s hearing things in anyway — and glances over. Seeing it’s only the Winter Soldier — _only_ , and isn’t that a change from what he thought when this blasted mission started — he allows himself a few more seconds to get his bearings. Stand up, a little wobbly, there’s glass shards and part of a fake tree buried in his kevlar. He takes a step and _shit_ something got through to his leg, too.

The Winter Soldier still doesn’t look at him. He’s packing his dozen weapons and his body armor away into a duffel bag. In a plain white t-shirt and jeans he almost looks like a regular person.

"Where are we?" Clint asks, and the Soldier raises his head. "And who’re they?" Clint points behind him, back at the bodies.

"Burke’s apartment," he replies. "Those were his guards."

"Okay, but… why are we here at all?" The location seems to be safe. The Winter Soldier isn’t on edge and has abandoned his weapons. Clint is the only threat to him, and not much of a threat. If the Soldier wants him dead, he’s dead, body armor or no, so he starts unhooking his armor and letting it crumple to the floor.

"I came here first," he explains. "Killed the guards and set up and then took the roof over."

"It’s kind of amazing that people never notice when we do things like that," Clint says, because roof-hopping is his thing, but not quite in broad daylight. The Soldier’s lip curls. "Oh christ please tell me no one saw you and you killed them for it."

"No," the Soldier replies, and there’s a hint of the monotone breaking. He sounds indignant. _Goddammit Barton did you really just offend the Winter Soldier. Where the fuck is your self-preservation instinct._ "What do you think I am?"

Not _who_.

 _What_.

"I don’t know," Clint admits. "I don’t, I…"

Something clicks, standing here in this building that isn’t the one he got blown up in.

"Shit," Clint says, and the Winter Soldier looks back up at him. "I didn’t mean what I just said."

His response is a blank stare. “I’m sorry,” Clint says, “and thank you.”

The stare has turned from blank to panicked, like a deer about to be hit by a train. “What,” he says, sitting back, seeming to forget the gun he has halfway wedged into the duffel bag.

Clint is about to sit down on the bed, thinks better of looking down on the Soldier, and lowers himself to the floor. Most of his muscles and a few of his bones scream in protest. It looks like the bloodstain on his jeans is getting bigger. “You pulled me outta there. You, what, dragged me across a dozen rooftops to get back here?”

"Not dragged," the Winter Soldier says. Is that a smile? No, that’s Clint’s imagination. "Carried."

"Think I would have a couple dozen more bruises if I was dragged," Clint agrees. He leans his head back against the bed as it starts to scream at him for moving again. “No, honestly, you saved my life, or at least kept me from Hydra or from being arrested or whatever. Thank you for that. Really.”

It’s honestly sad, how confused and awkward the Winter Soldier looks at being spoken to like a goddamn human being.

Also, in the face of those kicked-puppy eyes, Clint’s finding it really hard to remember that this is the same guy that threw a man out a window less than an hour ago. (It’s been less than an hour since they got out of there, right?)

“We need to leave,” the Winter Soldier says, closing the duffel bag and tossing it over Clint’s head onto the bed. “Can you move on your own?”

“I’m fine,” Clint says, which is a lie, but he can always make it home in this nebulously fine state, to then pass out on the couch and wake up bruised and hungry and with a concussion. He already misses SHIELD’s health insurance. Oh god maybe he does need an actual job.

“Your weapons were lost somewhere in the explosion,” the Winter Soldier informs him, moving across the room.

“It’s okay,” Clint says. “I have more, those weren’t important.” He still has his bow and that’s the one thing he didn’t want to leave behind. He stands up, wincing, and looks to see where the Soldier has gone, just in time to see him rip the door off of the safe. “Um.”

The Soldier reaches into the safe and pulls out several stacks of cash, which he tosses aside, and then a few more, which are also carelessly thrown over his shoulder. Some combination of curiosity and greed gets the better of Clint and he goes to investigate. Most of the stacks are twenties, but some are hundreds. “I guess this is his illegal Hydra salary, huh,” Clint says. The Winter Soldier doesn’t acknowledge him and stands up too quickly and swings around, snarling at the air. “Hey. Woah. Are you okay?”

No response. Instead: “You need something to carry your vest in,” and the Soldier disappears into another room and Clint starts working on the plan to get out of here. It’s a very simple plan, given that there shouldn’t be anyone with guns around and exfiltration of civilian living facilities is basic training. He goes to the bathroom to wash away what blood he can so he doesn’t scare passerby when he’s out of here and finds himself staring at the gold – he hopes it’s not real gold – frame of the mirror and the crystal lights. This is ridiculous.

He goes back into the bedroom to find the Winter Soldier with another duffel bag – it has a hole in the bottom and a few cobwebs on the outside – packing Clint’s body armor into it. ”Um,” Clint says, again. “Why are you doing this?”

The Winter Soldier looks up, alarmed.

“Look, I’m glad you saved my life, but you don’t owe me anything. I kind of owe you. You don’t have to help me, if you don’t want to.”

The Winter Soldier’s eyes are not the same color as the infamous computer blue screen of death, but there’s definitely something in his expression that makes Clint think he’s had an error and completely shut down. Clint doesn’t know if it was something he said or something else entirely. He doesn’t know what to do. Natasha was bad when he first met her, it took a lot to make her start thinking like a healthy human being, but she was right when she said she wasn’t like he is. She had a personality. She had a vague conceptual understanding of the fact that she was a human being.

“Hey, are you okay?” Clint crouches down. Because he was right, they _do_ need to go, but they’re going to get out of here and the Winter Soldier is going to take off in the opposite direction and this is Clint’s one shot.

Pale blue eyes are fixed unblinking on the far wall. Clint’s not sure what to say. “We have to go,” he tries, and that doesn’t get any reaction, and Clint is not about to try touching him. That’s the best way to get killed. “Hey. Bucky. Barnes. C’mon, are you here with me?”

He blinks, finally, and then asks in a whisper, “Steve?”

“Nah,” Clint says. “It’s me, Hawkeye – Clint Barton. My name’s Clint Barton. We went and blew up a Hydra base together. You pulled me out of an explosion. We’re in the apartment of the guy you threw out a window. We need to leave.”

The Winter Soldier’s eyes are focused again, looking at Clint, but his face has fallen and his shoulders slump. “Yes,” he says. “You’re.” Pause. “You’re my handler.”

“Oh christ no.” Clint stands up, paces a circle out, dumps five stacks of cash into the duffel bag with his body armor in it – it smells like mothballs – makes a few more circles around, and sits back down in front of the Winter Soldier. “No. No I’m not your handler. That thing we just did, taking out Hydra – we were equals there, okay? Equals.”

Clint’s stomach clenches with guilt as he realizes the fact that he left the Soldier to handle the shooting part while he took off and abandoned him probably made the impression that they weren’t equal, that the Soldier is the brawn and Clint is the brain.

(Clint Barton is never the brains of any operation. Clint Barton has lots of bad ideas. Clint Barton knows his own weaknesses.)

“No.” The Winter Soldier shakes his head. “The asset is at optimal performance when a handler is—”

“You blew up like, ten Hydra bases on your own before this!” It takes a lot to keep Clint from shouting and he can’t stop from raising his voice slightly. He imagines that shouting at the Soldier is the kind of thing handlers do. “No one was controlling you there. You know what I did in that time? Stared at that one building, mostly. You know what I did here, today? Got blown up and had to be carried out by you – Jesus, I don’t want to control you. You’re a goddamn human being and you don’t have to obey another order in your whole fucking life if you don’t like what someone’s asking of you. You don’t wanna do it, you don’t do it.”

There’s that _does not compute_ look again.

“We need to leave,” the Winter Soldier says, like he didn’t hear any of that last speech. In any other situation Clint would probably say _well duh I just said that_ but this is not any situation that should be handled with irritation and sarcasm. He’s not sure what it _should_ be handled with.

So he just stands up and says, “Yes, we do.” He goes and picks up the last few stacks of cash – no use letting that go to waste and he can put it to better use than Hydra – and then offers one of them to the Soldier. “Here. You need money?”

The Winter Soldier, standing now, duffel bag slung casually against his back like it isn’t full of weaponry, reaches out and takes a few bills. It’s probably about ten of them – and this is in twenties, that’s only some two-hundred dollars – _does he know that inflation happened and that’s not as much as it was in the forties?_ – he’s going to burn through that in a week. Clint thought it was obvious that he was giving away the whole stack.

He remembers, when he first brought Natasha into SHIELD, standing with Coulson as he went through the file they had on the Black Widow, all the red in her ledger, and being told, “Don’t get attached” like she was some goddamn dog that might have rabies and might need to be put down, not a human who could make amends like anyone else. He thinks that Natasha now had been trying to tell him that about Barnes – don’t get attached to the idea of saving him, don’t get attached to _him,_ and it doesn’t matter that Clint knows, rationally, that the Winter Soldier has survived on his own for the two-whatever months since Project Insight crashed and burnt in the Potomac. Emotionally, he can’t allow Bucky Barnes to head back out onto the streets.

He’s just not sure that the Winter Soldier will be receptive to – will even _understand_ – the concept of charity. Clint has to have an ulterior motive, doesn’t he? As a handler? Bring him back and then turn him around and prep him and send him out on another mission? (It took Natasha at least a year to accept that Clint Barton truly wanted nothing from her except to be her friend.)

“Well, let’s move, then.” Clint hoists his own bag onto his shoulder, feeling sort of like a bank robber or someone about to head off to make illicit deals with stolen money in the back of a restaurant. (Okay so he’s actually done that once.) The Winter Soldier has a jacket on now, brown leather that looks really expensive, and gloves, all of which is _very_ out of place for the middle of June, but this is New York and there are weirder people around.

(The weird _est_ congregate a little bit west, in Jersey.)

He tosses Clint something wallet-like, and Clint examines it to see that it’s one of the dead men’s ID and some express permission to actually be in this building and nebulous-government-organization badge. (Well, private contractor, not government, still nebulous.) “We’re them,” the Winter Soldier says, nodding at the two bodies, and thank _god_ they’re plainclothes guards because Clint doesn’t have a lot of qualms about anything but he’s not a fan of stealing uniforms off of dead people. “Called to handle a mess that someone made.” He _grins._

No, that’s not a smile. Humans are the only animals that express happiness as a smile. For every other species, bared teeth is a threat, intimidation. The Winter Soldier’s smile is like an animal’s.

Clint was about to say something but now he can’t remember what the words were. It probably wasn’t – hopefully wasn’t – important. The Soldier’s grin is gone now and he opens his hand to dangle a key ring off one finger. “And now we steal a car,” Clint says, but honestly he doesn’t have any actual objection to lodge against that plan. They’re going to take it and they’re going to ditch it somewhere and then Clint’s going to turn around and go home and what the hell is Bucky Barnes going to do?

They get the car and they get out of the parking garage – jesus _fuck_ this guy is loaded if he lives in a building with a fucking _parking garage_ attached, he probably never even goes in the garage and just calls up his chauffer to bring the car around to the front, Clint hates these kind of people – with no trouble, and the Winter Soldier even managed to put on an expression that’s relaxed and human for a few seconds as they pulled past the security guard. (He didn’t even glance at them for a full second. He’s going to get fired when this missing car is found out.)

There’s a lot of sirens wailing somewhere off in the distance, probably over at the SHIELD/Hydra building – wherever that is from here, Clint doesn’t know. Just as long as it’s in the opposite direction of where they’re going. Wherever that’s going to be. Clint’s trusting the driving and navigating of their getaway car to a man who most _definitely_ does not have a drivers’ license.

Really he shouldn’t be so trusting of, so okay with handing the reins over to the Winter Soldier.

Clint Barton also is very bad at doing the _shoulds._

So instead of listening to the little Natasha voice of reason – really what’s he supposed to do to extract himself from this situation now, jump out of a moving vehicle? He’s supposed to _avoid_ being noticed – he just shifts a little in his seat so that if the Winter Soldier speaks it’s not directed straight at Clint’s now-unaided ear and asks where they’re going.

“Somewhere less populated,” the Soldier replies, and then Clint can’t catch the rest of his sentence, because this still isn’t the best position.

“What was that? Sorry, couldn’t hear you.”

 “Where we can abandon this with no one seeing.”

“Yeah, and leave the keys in the ignition, and it’ll be gone,” Clint adds, and the Winter Soldier is looking at him with narrowed eyes; not malice, but confusion.

“Is something wrong with your ears?”

Yes, the Winter Soldier saved his life, but Clint still feels that concern from him is odd. Or maybe it’s not quite concern but instead probing the enemy for weaknesses that can be exploited in a future fight – as though Clint having hearing like a bat would somehow stop the Winter Soldier from being able to break him in half. ( _Bat-ear_ would be a stupid name anyway.)

“Yeah,” Clint answers, because what the hell, trust goes both ways, maybe he can prompt the Winter Soldier to open up. Figure out what’s going on in his head. “Mission went bad, got right in the middle of an explosion that was caused by some mad scientist’s experimental I-don’t-even-know what it was supposed to be for. Sonic disruptor ray? It disrupted _something_ all right. SHIELD’s been hooking me up with the best hearing aids the world’s got ever since. Got me back in the field.”

“They kept you as an asset even with that liability?”

“Agent, not asset. And yeah. Everyone’s got weaknesses.”

The Winter Soldier doesn’t respond and Clint wonders if anything he says is getting through, or if he’s just wasting his breath with this little trust exercise that went nowhere. He goes back to looking out the window and trying to figure out where the hell they are. He has no idea. It’s going to be fun walking home from here. He’ll have to look up where the nearest subway station is.

He’s about to pull out his phone and do that when he notices that the SUV is slowing down. The Winter Soldier turns it down a narrow alleyway, barely large enough for them to fit without scraping the mirrors on the buildings on either side. Clint has no idea how they’re going to get out without scraping the doors, and then he remembers that they’re ditching the car here anyway so it doesn’t matter.

He doesn’t intentionally smash the door into the bricks next to him, but he grins a little at the _crunch._ Not his problem. It’s a little bit of a squeeze to get out and around to the back. The Winter Soldier is already there, opening the trunk, taking out both their bags and handing Clint his. “Thanks,” he says automatically, fumbling for his phone, to look up where he is and how to get home. When he glances up, the Winter Soldier is already gone.

He scrambles out of the alley back to the main road and calls “Hey, Barnes!” at the Winter Soldier’s back and he hasn’t even figured out why he’s doing that when the words leave his mouth, but thankfully his brain catches up to his mouth by the time Clint catches up to the Soldier. He had frozen at Clint’s words, turns around now that Clint is at his shoulder.

“How do you know that name?”

The words are a bit threatening but the tone isn’t. “Steve,” Clint says, and there, that gets a response, eyes widening and eyebrows going up, the first real change of expression that he’s had for the course of this entire misadventure.

“You know Steve?” he asks in a hushed voice, like any louder and it’s going to send Clint running, never to answer the question.

“Yeah, we saved the world together, back a year or two.” Not that there was much time to get to know each other during that whole thing, especially since Clint missed the whole opening salvo, but the one thing about Steve Rogers that stuck with him was that, with Clint’s horrific new reputation going ahead of him, all it took was a nod from Natasha for Clint to get his trust.

Clint’s not sure how he’s supposed to pay that back. Maybe like this. Maybe by bringing his best friend in from the cold.

“Do you know where he is?”

Wow, that’s three questions and something almost resembling a back-and-forth conversation. Of course it took bringing up Steve to start prying words out of the Winter Soldier. “Somewhere out in the Midwest, I think. He was going after you, trying to find you.”

The Winter Soldier nods, slowly, twice, and then he looks at Clint with a kind of curious, expectant look, like he’s waiting for Clint to say something else. He has nothing else to say about Steve, but Steve wasn’t even the initial reason for this conversation.

“Hey, listen,” Clint says, and _oh god_ is this gutsy and stupid but when is he _not?_ “I don’t know where you sleep” – _or if you sleep –_ “or where you’re planning to go next but – I don’t know, if you’re… tired of killing people or want to set down somewhere stable for more than a day, I’m cool with houseguests. You can come crash at my place, if you want.”

At that, the Winter Soldier’s face slackens back into expressionless, eyes blank, and Clint’s finally figured out what the trigger word there is. _You want._ Weapons don’t want things and even if they did, weapons aren’t asked what they want.

“I can give you my address,” Clint says, and if his neighbors find out he invited an assassin to their doorstep okay honestly this still won’t be the most danger he’s ever put them in. (Existing near Clint Barton, Fuck-up Supreme, is dangerous.) “If I had something to write on that you could have…”

“I’ll remember it,” he replies. That should be a rejection or a joke, coming from an _amnesiac_ supersoldier, but he probably _does_ have a good memory when it’s not intentionally wiped. Operatives have to remember details like addresses, after all.

“Alright, you know what, I’ll just…” Clint takes out his phone again and quickly types down his address on a note and shows it to the Soldier. “Easier to get into your head written down, y’know? I can pull up a map, too, if you want.”

Ah goddammit, he said it _again._

“Brooklyn,” the Winter Soldier says, and his eyes are scanning over Clint’s address again and again. “I lived in Brooklyn.”

“Yeah,” Clint says. “Yeah, you did. Remember it?”

“No.”

“Hey, drop by, check it out. Third floor, apartment H. I can order a couple pizzas, throw on a movie…” – wait this sounds like a date and that’s only half of the reason why Clint trails off. The other part is that there are very few incentives for why anyone would ever want to come to his apartment. “I have a dog,” he adds lamely, like that’s going to be some tipping point.

The Winter Soldier looks at him, head tilted a little, brows furrowed, like he’s thinking hard. “I like dogs,” he says, slowly, each word heavy with much more gravitas and consideration than such a statement should usually have. (These are not usual conditions.)

“Great,” Clint says. “I’m headed back now, you can come with now, swing by later, whatever.” He takes a step away, and then another, giving the Winter Soldier some time to respond or start walking along with him or do something, anything, but he doesn’t. He just stands there, and Clint can’t really force a supersoldier assassin to accept his offered help, he’s done all he can. “Thanks again for saving my life. See you around.” 

And the Winter Soldier nods and Clint turns and heads up the street and gets about five minutes away before he realizes that he still has no idea where the hell he’s going.

\-----

The elevator is broken again and Clint Barton trips twice climbing up the stairs. The whole trek up to his apartment he hopes to god that none of his neighbors are coming in at the same moment because everything he spent today doing was illegal vigilantism and he probably shouldn’t admit to that. He doesn’t really have the energy to make up a plausible excuse about why he looks like he lost a fight with a wild moose.

So naturally, he almost thinks he’s made it in okay when he’s unlocking his door, and then someone taps him on the shoulder. He flinches away as he turns and then kicks himself for it when he sees it’s just Simone. She looks worried. “Sorry,” she says. “I just said hey from down the hall, and you didn’t respond, I thought I’d make sure your ears are all right.”

Clint grins. “Yeah, fine, just lost a hearing aid.” Simone is looking him up and down, growing more worried by the second, and he adds, “And a fight. W _iiii_ th a… door. And then a flight of stairs.”

Simone does not believe a single word out of his mouth, that much is obvious on her face. It always feels strange for Clint to go back to interacting with regular people who actually have emotions – as opposed to the Winter Soldier – or who don’t mask every emotion that they have, like Natasha or Hill. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m good, thanks.”

It takes everything Clint has to not just topple to the floor as soon as he stumbles into his apartment and shuts the door behind him. Lucky’s at his feet, whining and looking up at him. Clint flings his bag down and Lucky sniffs it and recoils. “Yeah, moth balls,” Clint says, leaning over and scratching the dog’s head. “I’m alright. Bet you’re hungry, though.”

He manages to pour out some dog food before he collapses face-first into the couch.

Something is buzzing. It could be his phone. He thinks he took it out of his pocket, though, and he has no idea where it is now. Maybe it’s his left ear going crazy. Maybe it’s the hearing aid in his right ear going crazy. Maybe it’s…

Maybe it’s the buzzer to his goddamn apartment, which he forgets about because no one comes to visit except Natasha, and she just lets herself in.

Lucky is barking at him, and so Clint rolls off of the couch onto the floor and drags himself up onto his feet. “God, what time is it,” he grumbles as he plods out to the door. “Who the hell is…”

He opens the door.

There stands the Winter Soldier, with two duffel bags and messy hobo hair, looking at Clint with what could only be described as _puppy dog eyes_. Clint blinks a few times, trying to ascertain that this is not his imagination or a concussion-induced fever dream or whatever the hell that would be called. “You said…” the Soldier starts, tentatively, like he thinks he’s made a mistake.

“Yeah, I did, c’mon in,” Clint says, kicking his bag aside – it’s still where he dropped it in the middle of the floor – to give him a clear path to enter. “Sorry, I’m not really that awake. Just put your stuff anywhere, I don’t care.”

The Winter Soldier sets both bags down next to Clint’s and takes off his gloves. He looks at Clint again, like he’s waiting for some cue or some opinion on his actions. “Yeah, ditch the jacket, make yourself at home – oh, yeah, here’s the dog.”

Lucky trots in from the living room and then stops, ears perked up as he assess the stranger. The Winter Soldier sets his gloves and jacket on the counter and crouches down to the dog’s level, extending his right hand. Lucky approaches slowly, stopping to sniff at the metal arm. The Winter Soldier offers that hand to him and after a few more seconds, Lucky decides that this stranger is okay and his tail starts wagging and he moves in to try to lick his face.

Well, the dog likes him, so he’s gotta be okay.

“So,” Clint says, and both of them look up. “Food. Pizza.” Lucky wags his tail at that word. “You want pizza?”

“Yes,” Bucky Barnes replies.


End file.
